The Importance of Families

Why is preservation of traditional marriage, between a man and a woman, vital to preservation of a good political society?

Malachi, a prophet who probably ministered in the 60 years after the first groups of Israelites returned to Jerusalem from Babylon, gives us God’s Word on the subject.

Having endured the Babylonian captivity for 70 sears, few of the returning Israelites had ever experienced the proper religious life of the pre-captivity period. Moreover, the Jerusalem to which they returned was a desolate ruin that had been destroyed and plundered by Judah’s enemies.

In those discouraging circumstances, Malachi admonished the Israelites’ that the only hope of regaining their former prosperity and political integrity was to remain faithful to God and not to turn to false gods.

The key point in the following passage is that a good and enduring society requires godly offspring, which can only happen in a godly family setting.

Another thing you do: You flood the LORD’s altar with tears. You weep and wail because he no longer pays attention to your offerings or accepts them with pleasure from your hands. You ask, “Why?” It is because the LORD is acting as the witness between you and the wife of your youth, because you have broken faith with her, though she is your partner, the wife of your marriage covenant.

“Has not the LORD made them one? In flesh and spirit they are his. And why one? Because he was seeking godly offspring. So guard yourself in your spirit, and do not break faith with the wife of your youth.

“I hate divorce,” says the LORD God of Israel, “and I hate a man’s covering himself with violence as well as with his garment,” says the LORD Almighty.

“So guard yourself in your spirit, and do not break faith.” (Malachi 2:13-16)

Today’s paucity of godly families and godly offspring is the flip side of our increasingly atheistic and materialistic society. As in the days of the Old Testament prophets, sooner or later, God will bring foreign enemies to overwhelm us if we continue on our present path.

Many commentators have noted the declining birth rates that have attended the turn toward atheistic materialism in Western European nations, and our own Northeastern states. In nations like France and Germany, the birth rate is almost too low to keep the population of native Germans and Frenchmen from declining. Same-sex “marriages,” whether desirable for other reasons or not, contribute nothing to the birth rate.

Two dangerous consequences are looming ahead. First, the non-working elderly constitute a rising percentage of the population, imposing an increasingly costly burden upon the socialistic welfare-state that will eventually bankrupt those societies. Second, there are ever fewer young people to defend those societies against the onslaught of Muslim jihadists, whose fecundity rates are much higher, producing vast armies of young people trained to die as suicide bombers.

Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.

About The Author Thomas E. Brewton:Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.